Comment by fnordpiglet
6 days ago
No technology will make it cheaper for YOU, just improve margins for the chain of fleecing between provider and insurance. Demand for healthcare is inelastic like water or air, so they can charge whatever they want and you pay or die. AI will of course amplify your costs while improving their profits.
What? This is also totally not true. Look at the results in treatment outcomes even over the past 10 years. You are getting more and better healthcare, for more money.
More money sucks, but it's not like there's nothing in return.
This is on the edge of treatments - but everything is more expensive. Primary care, bandaids at the clinic, everything.
Even then the advanced cares profitability is extraordinary. There are many examples but take Benlysta. It was developed with federal funding (my money) as the first new lupus treatment in 50 years. Wonderful. But it is priced at $36k/y for self injection. It’s been that price for 10 years. It costs them dollars per injection to produce it. This is definitely a great advancement, but it was highly subsidized, doesn’t cost anything near the amount to produce, and because they have a captive market, they have no inventive to produce a next generation. They just sit on the patents until they near expiration and renew under some minor modification indefinitely.
This isn’t just one case. It plays out across all the advanced health care.
I would say overall healthcare in the US is NOT better than it was 50 years ago. Specialists take months to see, primary care if offered is a month out. Many regions have no health care, similar to how it was 100 years ago. Doctors are harried, most replaced by PAs, many are directed in care by private equity savings schemes. Medical bankruptcy didn’t exist when I grew up, we had a public healthcare system, etc. Advanced treatments for cancer and difficult conditions are absolutely better - but that’s an investment in medical research. The medical SYSTEM is an absolute tire fire.
What's terrifying is that European countries which had a chance to create universal healthcare during last decades, instead aimlessly drift toward "American model". When medical professionals see the money involved in America the temptation is simply too big. They basically monetize pain and fear of dying, no professional medical treatment is offered. Greed is such a universal and strong feeling.